


Ducks and Drakes

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 04:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16654012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: When Sapphire's post-assignment debriefing takes an unsettling turn she thinks the solution lies in changing Steel's behaviour.





	Ducks and Drakes

Sapphire understands why this is necessary. When any mistake might cost the world, only perfection can be tolerated and yet none of them are ever perfect, not out there. So every mission, however successful in achieving its end, has to also conclude with the admission of failures along the way. The debriefing, she calls it to herself. 

She hates it. She imagines that the others do too, but it's not something that they discuss. It may not even be the same for them. For all she knows they get a congratulatory post-mission party thrown for them every time while she is sitting, hands folded, eyes on the patch of white floor in front of her, answering question after question in the most composed voice that she can muster. 

She expects this one to be particularly bad. Innocent people died, murdered in front of her. She failed to carry out several of Steel's requests. They had to be rescued by a civilian and the only solution they found was jerry rigged and temporary. There is plenty of material for her interrogators to focus on. It may even conclude with some form of sanction. That's not unprecedented. 

For a long time the debrief goes much as she expects. Everything they did they should have done sooner. Everthing they worked out they could have figured out before. She had not demonstrated adequate control over her powers. They had failed to safeguard the physical safety of the photograph even after they became aware that it was linked to the missing persons. The agents' solution was sloppy, dangerous and by Steel's own admission left the woman in continuing danger. 

None of this needs to be said to her explicitly,. Their questions are enough. 

_Say it again._

"You've failed" Sapphire again twists her voice into a mimicry of the anger that she remembers. This is new and disconcerting, this focus on what Steel said to her. 

She wants to say, 'He was frustrated. He cares so much about succeeding, more than any of us. I let him down, he snapped at me, he moved on. It didn't matter.' But they aren't interested in her opinion and they don't value her judgement. Perhaps they merely wish to repeat Steel's condemnation. She did, after all, let him down. 

Now they are done with her, for the moment. They will consider her testimony. There will be consequences. Sapphire manages not to shudder. The penalties for misstepping are aways unpleasant, and although Time may not have been fractured, this time, she - they - unarguably misstepped more than once. 

 

Steel is skipping flat grey pebbles across the stillness of a silver sea when she finally tracks him down. Sapphire sits on a convenient rock outcrop, chin on her hands, and counts the bounces. Seventeen, fifteen, twelve, sixteen, eighteen, nine, fifteen again, and now his trouser pocket is empty. He starts searching along the beach, bending over to pick up a pebble every few seconds, discarding a little over half of them for technical reasons that she can't even guess at - they look the same as the others to her. 

Sapphire's heeled shoes transform to plimsolls with a flicker of thought as she leaves the rock to walk beside Steel in silence. When a dozen stones are rattling against each other in his pocket he turns back to the liquid's edge and throws the one in his hand, side arm and almost perfectly flat. It skips off the surface again and again, in shorter and shorter lengths until it is almost stationary and then instead of bouncing it abruptly sinks underneath the silver and is gone. Even between assignments it is unlike Steel to do something to such little purpose. 

"Sixteen." Sapphire says aloud. "Not bad."

"For a human body," he says dismissively, grimacing as he draws his arm back again. 

Sapphire does not know what form Steel was born, or created, in. She used to revert to her own crystalline essence between assignments, soaking up stellar radiation in blissful, mindless ease, but when she was first partnered with Steel she found that he was not inclined to change shape except as work demanded and after a while she felt self conscious about her own indulgence, a sense that she ought not to block herself off from her partner's potential communications, even outside missions. 

He throws five more stones before he speaks again. "They frightened you, I suppose." 

Sapphire is familiar with the biological markers of fear in the human bodies they currently inhabit; the fast heart beat, the rapid breathing, the light headedess, the racing thoughts, the need to run. She feels none of these. "Not frightened, no." she says, carefully. 

"Then what are you doing here?" 

'Here' is a fragment, extending barely further than human senses can detect. A copy, she thinks, of somewhere real. Of a tiny piece of the Earth, higher in oxygen than she is used to, five hundred million years before humans evolved to skim stones on beaches. She has never visited the Earth of that period. She wonders why Steel was there, what prompted him to commission a copy and from whom. He couldn't have made it himself. 

"They are concerned," she says. 

He snorts. "Concerned. You're projecting your own emotions onto them. You should know better."

"No," she says. This is her area, not his. "Listen to me." 

"Concerned about what, exactly?" He still hasn't accepted her statement but at least he's listening. 

"About us. About how we work together."

"And are you also concerned about us, Sapphire?" His voice is dry. 

"No. Of course not. Why should I be?"

"For the same reasons as they are, I presume. Unless you're claiming that they are mistaken?" 

For Steel the fallibility of their masters is close to being an article of faith. Sapphire is used to him mocking her for her lingering belief that someone in this place actually knows what is going on.

"It might be wise to reassure them," she suggests. 

He throws another stone. This time it is at too sharp an angle and it slices into the water. "We complete the assignments. Why should they care how we do it?" 

"It doesn't matter whether they should care or not. They do care," Sapphire insists. 

There is silence except for the faint noise of another stone on the water. She frowns at the water's edge, puzzled. It hasn't moved so much as a centimeter since she arrived, and yet this is definitely a beach, with pebbles worn smooth. "Is this a lake? I though it was a sea." 

"There is no moon here," Steel says. He sounds annoyed at her question but he might already have been irritated by the conversation. "And no wind." 

"So no tide and no waves," she says. Whoever made this could have created artificial water movement to mimic the surf, the ebb and flow of Earth oceans, but she can tell now that this is just a passive, material copy of a beach, stone for stone and water for water. It does not do anything, it just is. 

The air is nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and trace gases. The stone she picks up from the shallow edge is a form of quartz. Flint, the humans call it. There are traces of organics on the beach and in the salt water but nothing still alive. There is an unchanging gravity keeping the elements in place but above them is not sky but bright nothingness. 

"Have you finished prying?" Steel doesn't try to hide his irritation now. This is his place, she reminds herself, to which she had come uninvited, not an assignment. There is no wrongness to detect here. 

"Sorry. Force of habit." 

As the pebbles grind under her feet she does her best to close off her non human senses. Just ordinary stones and water, land and sea. 

"So you say that they are concerned." Steel says after two rather more impressive throws. "But without reason, according to you. What do you propose that I should do about the situation?" 

His tone is scathing but Sapphire takes the question at face value anyway. "You could keep a better rein on your temper," she suggests. 

That pleases him just as much as she predicted it would, which is to say not at all. He ignores her for a few minutes, his focus on the stones in his hand as he sends each a hundred and twenty feet or so across the bright water. Without really intending to she calls up the data on what some of the humans call ducks and drakes. These distances are not even halfway to what will one day be called the world record. She decides not to mention that right now. 

"You took offence," he says abruptly. 

"I did not," she counters. There is a touch of sharpness in her own tone. "I know you, after all. I'm not asking for myself. This is just to keep then happy."

He snorts at that. "Do you think they are capable of happiness?"

"Allay their concerns then, if you prefer." 

And what do you think will happen if their concerns are not allayed? In your professional opinion, Sapphire?"

She pauses before she answers, precisely. "In my professional opinion? They may separate us."

She can't read his face even though she is looking straight into it. Maybe this is what he wants. She doesn't know of any other operative that he has a strong bond with, but then maybe she doesn't know that much about him. This place, for instance. She didn't know about it and she still doesn't knew what it means."

"I don't do nice," Steel's voice is harder, has gone down a degree or two. 

"I know that, Steel."

"And I don't do playacting."

"But you can," she says. "When you need to." Though she had to admit that pretending about anything has never been Steel's strongest point. 

"Do you really think we could fool them for long?"

"Of course not." She reaches out to brush the back of his hand with her fingers, briefly. "But I think that we could demonstrate a willingness to make an effort." 

"We? If I'm required to be mindlessly affable in the face of your blatant errors then what will your penance consist of?" 

Her silence means that he has caught her off guard and they both know it. "Come back when you have an answer," he says and turns away from her and back towards the motionless sea. 

 

"Do we have to be human?" Silver complains inside her head. "They have such an imprecise way of thinking."

He has taken human form for her, nevertheless. They sit in plastic chairs with thousands of other, real humans. Ticker tape of bronze, gold and silver swirl down on them from a sky lit in lasers and spotlights. In front of them a huge stadium is crammed with movement, both on the ground and off it. Music is playing from all directions, portentous and loud. Flyers swoop and turn within a few yards of them, bright winged, smiling. 

"Where are we?" she shouts at him. She could find out for herself but since Silver brought her here he presumably knows. It's as good a start as any to a conversation. 

"Laos," he shouts back. "Twenty one thirty four. It's the opening ceremony of the Olympics." And to her incomprehension. "A sporting event. The rest of it's mostly dull but this is pretty. If we're going to be stuck as human for a while we might as well pick one of the good bits." 

He rotates a forefinger and the noise around them fades by about half. "That's better. It's always a pleasure to meet up, even with this particularly awkward number of limbs, but I presume that you want something other than my company?" 

"I was hoping for advice," Sapphire says. 

"From me? Technical advice, I presume?" 

"Not really, no." Sapphire says. "More personal, if anything. Or perhaps professional." 

"Personal or perhaps professional? Neither of those sounds like my usual neck of the woods. But for you I shall try not to be utterly clueless. Would you care to elucidate?" 

Sapphire explains, carefully, about the reasons she has for thinking that their masters are not satisfied with the performance of their operatives, and her conversation with Steel. It is a difficult thing to talk to anyone about, and while Silver listens attentively, head on one side, she is not sure that a technician can really grasp the nature of her concerns. 

He says as much when she finishes. "Bit outside my field, I'm afraid. People, that is. But if it's Steel's less than charming outbursts of annoyance that bother them, why should you have to change at all?" 

"It's not all his fault," she says. 

"Isn't it?" His eyes flicker over the spectacle and back to her. "Sorry. I must have missed something." 

"If I hadnt made so many mistakes..."

He waves a dismissive hand. "You're an operative. They send you in when the answer's not obvious, sometimes when they are not certain that there may be an answer. No one could expect you to always get it right first time." 

"Easy for you to say. You don't get things wrong," she says. 

"We aren't generally sent to do anything we don't have the skills for. Anyway, what do you intend to do about your mistakes? Declare yourself infallible?" 

"If I knew what I was going to do I wouldn't have asked your advice." She was foolish to think he might be able to help. Silver is what he is and only what he is. 

He reaches up, fingers spread, and the metal confetti starts to stream between the digits from all around, weaving into a intricate braid." "Do you like it?"

"Very much so," she says. It's mesmerising, sparkling in three colours across his palm. 

He flicks a finger and it settles around her neck. It's warm to the touch and she can't help smiling. 

"Let's see what Steel makes of that," he says with some satisfaction. "You make a remarkably successful team, Sapphire. Everybody recognises that, even him. Don't take his fuss personally."

"I never have before," she says. "But then I've never felt before as if I were caught between him and them."

"If you're stuck, why not try a different angle?" And suddenly the metallic confetti is streaming sideways across her field of vision as he appears on the other side of her. "You might find that your dilemma's just a visual illusion." 

He kisses her hand, warm silver swirling around her wrist and up to caress her palm, and she's alone again, and in the silence of home. 

 

'Real' is often a relative term. 

Take Steel's beach. The stones are made of the same kinds and arrangements of atoms as the stones on Earth that they were copied from. No material tests could distinguish original and copy. And yet their history is completely different and much shorter. They are round because they were put together that way, not because tide and waves have worn their edges down. They are substantial but not genuine. Are they real? 

Take Steel, throwing his stones far across the waveless sea. He undoubtedly has a long and complex history. Like the rock he is here, right now, and nowhere else. If Sapphire put her hand out she could feel the hairs on his arm, the warmth of his skin. 

And yet what she sees when she looks at him is three parts illusion. Whatever form he was in before he joined them is not the shape she sees now. He didn't dress himself in the clothes he wears. Nobody wove those fabrics and the leather of his shoes was never hide stripped from an animal. Even his mind is somewhat manipulated and constrained by its adopted form as human. He is history hidden in alteration and illusion. Is he real? 

He turns and looks at her, not at her face but at the woven band resting around her neck. Unlike her clothes the necklace is a real thing as far as real can ever be established. Atoms of silver, gold, copper and tin were created in a supernova, deposited when the young Earth cooled, dug up, refined, hammered into the thinnest of sheets, chopped into confetti and then reforged by Silver into their current form. The chain has as much unbroken history as virtually anything else in the universe. In this place of copies and illusion it cannot help but draw his attention.

"That's a bit ostentatious for you, isn't it?"  
.  
She puts a hand up to the warm metal and smiles. "I like it."

"Did he have any useful advice for you, or was he just buying your favour with trinkets?" 

"He recommended a change of perspective," she says. "I'm trying it." 

"If it's Silver's perspective I wouldn't hold out much hope for it." 

"No," she says. "It's mine." 

She bends down and chooses a stone, flat, oval, cool to the touch. She knows the angle, spin, direction and velocity at which it has to leave her hand but she can't imagine how she needs to move to achieve this. 

The stone arches too high, curves down and hits the water with an audible 'plop'. The second one is flatter across the water but it still doesn't bounce. 

"It needs more spin," Steel says. "What are you trying to prove?" 

"I'm curious to know how it's done." 

After her fourth stone sinks on first contact Steel sighs and picks up a stone of his own. "Hold it like this, between thumb and forefinger. That's where the spin comes from." 

Thirty minutes of somewhat impatient tuition later her spinning stone bounces five times before disappearing. 

"Excellent! That's enough for me." 

"So now do I have to listen to the point, or the metaphor, or the moral, perhaps?" Steel is eyeing her with clear suspicion. 

"No. Thank you for showing me how to skim the stones. I'll leave you in peace until our next briefing." 

She doesn't need to walk away from Steel across the flint pebbles. She could just vanish from her spot by his side but exits and entrances are significant. And sure enough, as she takes the fourth step and starts fading away from the little world he says, "Wait."

She waits. 

"What about our problem?" 

Sapphire turns to him. "We don't have a problem." 

"No? Then what about their problem with us?" 

"You asked me what my penance will be - well, I refuse to make one." Sapphire says. "If I make mistakes I'll take responsibility for them but I will not change what I am in the hope that it pleases them better, and I don't expect you to do differently." 

He looks at her. "Is that what Silver advised you?" 

She laughs. "I'm afraid Silver was rather out of his depth with such a resolutely non technical problem, but talking to him helped me think. If I do nothing risky for fear of making errors I will be useless and it doesn't matter whether the result of those errors are your annoyance, their displeasure or the disintegration of Time."

She manages to raise a half smile from him at that. 

"Let"s avoid the last of those if we can," he says. "So, no playing fake nice for our masters. Good. I thought it was a terrible idea from the start." 

"I know you did." Sapphire still has her review to get through but she feels that things are, at least as far as they ever are, well between her and her partner. "I'll leave you to commune with your rocks and water."

"I'm curious though," he says at her third step away. "What did any of that have to do with teaching you to skip a stone?" 

"Nothing at all," she says without turning. "I just thought that anything you did for no other reason than entertainment must have the potential to be quite mindblowingly amazing. It turned out that it wasn't quite that good but I did have fun. Thank you." 

She hears not quite a laugh but undoubtedly a snort as she flicks out of his company and into her own quiet place, to wait until the next summons.


End file.
